Herbert Eugene Bolton_Historian of the American Borderlands

by Albert L. Hurtado

  Bolton's jaw must have dropped when he read Conmy's letter. He had recently received the Serra Award from the Academy of American Franciscan History. Serra Cause advocates had given him a special silver medal for his work on behalf of the proposed saint. Pope Pius XII had knighted Bolton with the Equestrian Order of Saint Sylvester for the same reason. Bolton numbered many lay Catholics, priests, and nuns among his friends and graduate students. Many of the Native Sons traveling fellows (most of whom were Bolton's students) had collected documents in foreign archives relating to Catholic history in the Americas. For almost half a century Bolton had championed Catholic missions and missionaries. But in 1950 none of this was enough for the Catholic anticommunist (and personally aggrieved) Conmy. If it was true that education departments discriminated against him and other Catholics, what sense did it make to punish a department that had probably done more than any other non-Catholic history department to advance Catholic history in the United States?

  Bolton did not respond to Conmy's bizarre combination of contemporary politics and personal animus, and probably that was best under the circumstances. He had known Conmy for more than thirty years and perhaps understood that it would be futile to argue the matter. Conmy had taken the History of the Americas course with Bolton as an undergraduate, but Bolton had refused Conmy permission to enroll in his graduate seminar. Instead Conmy enrolled at Stanford, where he eventually took the MA in history. From Cal he earned a master's in education, an EdD, and a library degree. He also took several law courses at Boalt Hall.17 In 1939 Conmy asked Bolton for a recommendation to teach at San Francisco Junior College. “I think that you will agree that I have had enough work in history to teach same in junior college,” Conmy wrote. Although Bolton may have agreed, a letter for Conmy has not surfaced. Perhaps Conmy believed that Bolton had not adequately supported him, though Bolton was under no particular obligation to do so. Conmy's general complaints against the University are hard to credit, but he doubtless believed that he had been a victim of religious prejudice in the academic world, as many Catholics had been. His grievances were not the product of a deranged mind, but one prepared to see slights where none existed. Conmy's complaint shows that bigotry, real or imagined, can be deeply wounding. Conmy sent copies of his letter to President Sproul and others, but there was nothing to be done. The Native Sons fellowships were gone and would never return.

  Finding new sources for funding graduate research would have to be someone else's concern. Bolton redoubled his efforts to raise money for his many pending projects. He even tried to sell his own considerable collection of historical manuscripts.18 Evidently there were no buyers, because after his death these papers became part of his collection at the Bancroft Library. In 1949 he sketched out a plan that he thought would attract donors. He wanted to edit and publish the great Venegas manuscript that he had acquired for the Bancroft Library. Then he planned to write a biography of Gaspar de Portola, first Spanish governor of the Californias. He was obligated to write “Daughter of Spain” for the Chronicles of California series, and he listed several other projects. Even though he was approaching eighty years old, Bolton still hoped to secure funding for his projects. He thought he could “get Big Money,” as he jotted at the top of his notes.19

  Bolton wrote to Horace Albright and other wealthy people asking for donations to provide stipends, research assistants, and other support. He emphasized the need for a general synthesis of the history of the Western Hemisphere, “a vision which I first among historians conceived.” The projected book was “vital to inter- American understanding,” and if Bolton did not do it, no one else would. “I never expected to write such a communication to anybody,” Bolton claimed, but the University was giving money to the “new sciences” and not to history, or at least not to Bolton.20 As he explained in his letter to the American Council of Learned Societies, he wanted to give up teaching at San Francisco State so that he could continue his work unencumbered. He asked Guy Ford, who was still secretary of the AHA, where he might get “a fairly sizable research grant” to finish his hemispheric study. “I have a habit of delivering the goods,” he reminded his fraternity brother, “and I was never more ‘rarin’ to go than right now.”21

  But money did not flow in Bolton's direction as it once had. In 1950 he resorted to teaching history at Contra Costa Junior College at $3.50 per hour, which was even less than he got at San Francisco State. He was required, of course, to sign the standard state loyalty oath affirming that he had not been a member of the communist party or other subversive organization for the past five years.22

  Bolton's plans for the future no doubt struck potential donors as a bit unrealistic. He may have felt fit as a fiddle, except for his weak heart, but others understood that Bolton was an old man. Perhaps Bolton's projects were no longer the best investment in scholarship that a well-heeled donor could make. Still, Bolton tried to convince old friends that he was still up and at ‘em. When he sent a copy of Coronado to Sidney Ehrman, he insisted that he was “still on the job.”23 The oath controversy was then raging, and Bolton might have taken the opportunity to express an opinion about it to his old friend and supporter. He did not.

  Bolton was not exaggerating when he insisted that he was still working. The Escalante project was now his full-time concern. He had agreed to publish it with the utah Historical Society, but the society president evidently got wind of Bolton's dealings with New Mexico and Coronado. “Any rumor that you may have heard that somebody other than yourself is to publish my Escalante is without foundation,” Bolton averred.24 As usual, Bolton the perfectionist was slow in completing the manuscript. He gave his usual reasons for delay—the complications of preparing an accurate edited translation and of drafting a detailed map based on meticulous research and personal observations of the trail. “Somebody said ‘Scholarship is Hell on Manners,'” Bolton apologized to his editor in utah. “You will probably say ‘so are scholars.'”25

  In early 1951 Bolton was pushing himself to put the finishing touches on the Escalante manuscript when something terrible and completely unexpected happened. Charles Hackett, one of Bolton's first graduate students at Texas and Stanford, was ill with cancer. Late in February, “Hackie” as Bolton's young daughters had once called him, shot himself.26 Bolton was devastated. The two had been especially close. Hackett had lived with the Boltons when he was a student. “Mrs. Bolton and I loved him as a son,” Bolton wrote, “my children adored him as a brother.”27 Such a loss could not be overcome.

  On March 15 Laura Brower, Bolton's third daughter, drove her car on to the Golden Gate Bridge, stopped near the south tower, and got out. She ran to the railing and jumped to her death. Papers reported that she had been depressed because of a serious illness. She left a note for her family. “I am sorry it has to be this way, but there seems to be no answer. I love you.” The San Francisco Chronicle carried the news on the front page under “UC Professor's Daughter Leaps from the Gate Bridge.” Other Bay Area papers also carried the story.28 One cannot easily imagine the impact of such a tragic and horrifying event on the elderly father and mother. The very public nature of the death, the spectacular means of accomplishing it, and the stigma that then attached to suicide must have made Laura's death infinitely worse for the Boltons to bear.

  There are no letters from Bolton about Laura's death. Perhaps he simply could not bring himself to write about it. Bolton handled his daughter's death as he handled everything else. He buried his grief in work. He had promised the Escalante manuscript to his editor in May but was able to get it to him in April. He called it Pageant in the Wilderness.

  Pageant would not have surprised any of Bolton's devoted readers. Explorer priests were the heroes of the story. Bolton likened one of them to “Daniel Boone in Franciscan garb” and gratuitously mentioned the Declaration of Independence because the expedition occurred in 1776.29 The book included two folded maps in a pocket. One is a facsimile of a map from the time, richly detailed with place names, to
pographical features, Indian territories and their communities, and Spanish settlements. The other map shows the route of the Escalante trail as established from Bolton's archival and field research. It was all vintage Bolton. But there is something in Bolton's tone and style that sets it apart from his earlier work. The prose is spare, and he emphasized the peaceful nature of the episode he described. “unlike many chapters in the early history of North America,” this expedition did not result in bloodshed. While he noted that there were some Indians who resisted Spanish colonization, these pages were filled with cooperative people. When Fray Escalante met with a friendly Havasupai, “the friar lighted a cigarro,” he wrote. They “alternately puffed on it,” and “then they smoked another.”30 This intimate, cooperative encounter resulted in a crude map of some of the country that Escalante and his companions would cover in their journey. Bolton's conclusion was hopeful: “Thus ended one of the great exploring expeditions of North American history, made without noise of arms and without giving offense to the natives through whose country they had traveled.”31 Historical outcomes were not as happy for Indians as Bolton's words suggested.32 Even a quiet conquest can have bad results for the conquered.

  But Bolton was in no mood to think about bad outcomes. He immersed himself in the details of an imaginary world of Spanish explorers and merged it with his own past. He reached far back into his memory to describe the sort of horse that Fray Francisco Garces might have ridden. “From boyhood experience with Spanish mustangs used by the Winnebago Indians of Wisconsin,” he recalled, “I have imagined that Garces’ horse was buckskin colored, with a dark stripe along his backbone.”33 We may wonder about the accuracy of Bolton's boyhood memories of Indian ponies in the Badger State, but it is no wonder that such memories were crowding in on Bolton's thoughts about his Spanish heroes. He seemed to be in a contemplative mood, brought on perhaps by personal tragedy as well as the turmoil of the oath controversy. Maybe his age had something to do with it. Bolton was eighty years old when Pageant was published. It was his last book.

  With Pageant finished, Bolton turned to other projects and worked in his time- honored way—every day, all day, and part of the night. Gertrude drove him to campus and picked him up for dinner, but sometimes he would climb into a vehicle that resembled the family car without bothering to identify the driver. Forbearing neighbors drove him home, much to the chagrin of Gertrude, who waited for Herbert until finally returning home to find him there. He was the stereotypical absent-minded professor, totally preoccupied with his work; but old age may have impaired his ability to immediately recognize familiar faces. In 1950 his grandson Thomas Johnson, a student at Berkeley, met him on campus and said, “Hi, Big Papa,” his family nickname. Bolton looked up and asked, “Who are you?”34Perhaps Bolton's failure to instantly identify his grandson was simply due to his having been abruptly roused from deep concentration on one of his projects or even on the loyalty oath controversy. Yet there is no denying that old age takes its toll, and Bolton was not an exception, no matter how strenuously he denied it.

  Impaired or not, Bolton spent his days working on projects and dealing with the voluminous correspondence that still came his way. When asked to write a foreword to a new book, he wanted to know how much he would be paid. The answer must not have been encouraging, because Bolton's contribution consisted of two sentences: “A good book needs no foreword by anybody but the author. This is an admirable book.”35

  Yet Bolton was generous to Wilbur R. Jacobs, a young professor at the Santa Barbara campus who wanted to know what Turner had been like as a teacher. Bolton wrote a long helpful letter with two supplements that Jacobs eventually published.36 He thought that Turner was a great historian “not because of voluminous writings, but for the freshness of his ideas,” which “gave significance to the history of every township, county, territory, or state.” Bolton read his own ideas about the Americas into Turner's frontier thesis. While the Master's frontier essay “appealed to local patriotism everywhere across the Continent, from Plymouth to San Francisco,” he wrote, it now illuminated “the history of all the other Americas—British, Spanish, Portuguese, French and Dutch. No wonder Turner is worshiped as a prophet.”37 A grateful Jacobs visited Bolton in Berkeley, where he found him working at his desk, wreathed in tobacco smoke.38 Jacobs called him the “master” of the “Bolton School.”39

  Many people asked for Bolton's help, and they usually got it if it was within his power. An anthropologist wanted to know something about the shells that Bolton had described in one of his early books (probably Kino). “Whatever I may have said…was more reliable than what I remember about them now.” Then, oddly, he quoted the Bible: “When I was a child [I] spake as a child, etc.”40

  Someone sent him a battle-ax that he found “very interesting indeed.” The relic might have been left on the coast by that old sea dog Francis Drake. Bolton hoped to have it examined by “the very best authorities in the United States. That is what we did with the Drake Plate and the result is that all specialists are convinced that it is genuine. I hope for a similar opinion regarding the axe.”41 Evidently the ax did not pan out, for Bolton said no more about it. Allen Chickering sent Bolton a facsimile of the Drake Plate that he greatly appreciated.42 Bolton continued his usual work routine, but some of the juice had gone out of him. Then came another blow. Early in 1952 Helen Schneider, his second daughter, underwent surgery. Postoperative complications took her life. “She is a very dear child,” he had written many years previously when baby Helen had been desperately ill. She was “beautiful in temperament and feature. We can't spare her.”43 But now she was gone.

  Despite these crushing personal losses the eighty-two-year-old Bolton made the effort to keep up his daily regimen. In June he attended the Baccalaureate Mass for Catholic graduates of Cal. He told the priest, “Old age is just an illusion.”44 Some illusion. One afternoon not long after the mass, Bolton was working at his Bancroft desk. When it was time to go home, his legs would not work. Friends took him to the hospital, where doctors determined that Bolton had suffered a stroke. They sent him home to recuperate.

  Letters and visitors descended on the Bolton home. Horace Albright was in Glacier National Park when he heard about Bolton and his daughter Helen. “You are a great hero to us here by these two pieces of grievous news, and we are saddened more than we can express in words.”45 In August his friend John Bannon wrote him a letter that Bolton's assistant, Virginia Thickens, read to him. Bolton still could not read and found it difficult to speak but “was most emphatic in asking me to tell you that he ‘received it with great pleasure,'” Thickens wrote.46

  He recovered his speech and seemed to rally somewhat. He enjoyed visits from his children and grandchildren, but his mind drifted. One day when his daughter Eugenie and her daughter Gale were visiting, he began to speak to no one in particular about his childhood in Wisconsin. He had a second stroke that confined him to his bed for good. More small but debilitating strokes followed. He could not remember the recent past. As his friend Father Bannon put it, he lived in “Texas of the eighteenth century, with his Black Robes of Pimeria Alta,…with the friars and soldiers of early California.”47 On January 30, 1953, Bolton died quietly.48

  …

  The Board of Regents was meeting in San Francisco when word reached them that Bolton was dead. They extolled the man who had served the University for so long, so well, and so faithfully. The San Francisco Chronicle called him “California's leading historian and beloved University of California professor.”49 The paper reported that Bolton “died while completing notes on a study of Father Garces, early Arizona and California missionary,” as if the old professor had been hard at work when impertinent Death tapped him on the shoulder. Everyone knew the true stories about Bolton's rigorous work habits. “A late light burning in the Bancroft…meant that the eminent scholar was at work on his research.”50 The light burned no more.

  There was a small funeral in the Berkeley Hills Chapel in whic
h Fred Stripp, Baptist minister and colleague in the speech department, presided. Family and friends visited the funeral home. Mrs. Sproul attended for the president. Sydney Ehrman was there. John Hicks and Bolton's students who taught in the history department paid their respects.51 Bolton was cremated and his remains were buried near his daughter Laura at Sunset View Cemetery on a hillside with a view of the Golden Gate. About a year later Gertrude died and was buried next to Bolton.

  Two weeks after Bolton's death a memorial service was held for him in Newman Hall across the street from the Berkeley campus. Father Francis G. Quinan presided over a Catholic mass for Bolton's soul. “Here in our beloved country we differ about religion,” Father Quinan observed afterward. “But the American way, thank God, is to respect those differences. And that was the way of this great man we honor this morning.” Quinan thought that it was appropriate that people of all religious faiths had come together to honor Bolton. “In this age of ours…we need…to come closer together.” Bolton was not a Catholic, but he appreciated the mass, Father Quinan said, because “it brought him back in spirit to the days of the old Padres—to a Serra…a Crespi, Padre Kino and other zealous friars.” Bolton had shared these thoughts with Father Quinan, yet “his spiritual life he kept to himself.” Still the priest assured his listeners that Bolton's faith was “healthy, unobtrusive, a living part of him.” Then he read to the assembly Bolton's favorite piece of scripture, Chapter 13 of St. Paul's First Epistle to the Corinthians: